The only certainty about a new Rupert Thomson novel – besides the clear, elegant prose – is that it will defy the expectations of his readers. Over the course of 10 novels, his breadth and variety of subject, style and genre has been so ambitious and seemingly effortless that it has made it difficult to fit any neat labels to his writing.
Katherine Carlyle is no less accomplished or ambitious, though it could not, at first glance, appear more different from his last, Secrecy, the story of a sculptor in 17th-century Florence. Katherine Carlyle also begins in Italy, though the story’s true point of origin is further back, in the lab of a London hospital.
Katherine, known as Kit, is 19 when she begins her narrative. She appears to live a privileged life in Rome, largely left to her own devices by her war reporter father; her friends are wealthy and attractive, and she is about to take up a place at Oxford. But she is haunted by absences. There’s the loss of her mother, who died when Katherine was 12; her father, constantly away working; her first love, from whom she has recently split and, most insistently, the strange absence implicit in her own beginning, detailed in the book’s prologue.
Katherine was created as an IVF embryo, then left frozen for eight years before being implanted in her mother. The idea of this limbo, these years in which she both did and did not exist, has created a lacuna in her sense of self, as she explains to a stranger: “‘Those frozen years, they’re still with me. They’re imprinted on my cells. On my DNA.’ I pause. ‘I’m actually made out of those years.’”
So she begins a quest for a deeper sense of meaning, by walking out of her life and “experimenting with coincidences”; a journey that takes her from Germany to Russia and further north, to the Arctic circle, a symbolic return to another frozen darkness, though her professed desire to disappear is really a cry for her father’s love and attention.
Thomson’s first novel, in 1987, was called Dreams of Leaving; Secrecy, too, was the story of a man trying to distance himself geographically from his past. Journeys feature prominently in his books, and there’s something primal in Katherine’s restlessness, her desire to live “with a kind of freedom I never imagined”, that resonates deeply.
But the novel is also careful to show that, for a young woman, the pursuit of liberty is always circumscribed; though she believes she is determining her own trajectory, at each new destination Katherine is noticed principally by men. Some help, others threaten, but all of them, it is implied, have ulterior motives; she cannot escape the way her youth, sex and isolation place her in relation to others.
It is a bold choice for Thomson, a man who’s just turned 60, to write so intimately in the voice of a 19-year-old woman, but Katherine is a wholly compelling character, one who remains curiously elusive despite her apparent candour. “Sometimes I imagine I have been carved out of ice,” she says, and there is an element of the Snow Queen about her, a certain fairytale quality to her encounters. As in Secrecy, there is a sense that her story is about concealment, what is hidden below the carefully arranged surface. Once again, Thomson has created a novel that resists easy categories, but remains with the reader long after the last page, asking profound questions about the way we choose to live and connect with others.
Katherine Carlyle is published by Corsair (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
